Every year Cisco produces a Global Cloud Index, a report that was developed to estimate (and it is just an estimate) global data center traffic growth and general trends. The report is a complementary resource to Cisco’s more general IP network studies, but it provides more meat for which cloud-specific pundits can chew on.+ Also on Network World: Enterprise IT pros see most workloads in cloud by 2018 +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A team founded by PhD researchers who studied some of the first instantiations of software defined networking at Stanford University have a new startup named Forward Networks that help users understand network behavior while protecting and predicting how changes will impact the system.The key to Forward Networks' technology is an algorithm developed at Stanford that allows a software copy of a network to be created. Using this copy, users can run tests on it before implementing changes into production and identify the cause of a problem when something is wrong, says CEO David Erickson.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: What you need to know about Microservices +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Small businesses that need a tool to track their relationships with customers now have a new weapon from Microsoft in their arsenal.On Monday, the company launched Outlook Customer Manager, a lightweight customer relationship management (CRM) system. It allows users to track their customers, manage deals in progress, track tasks and more, all from their Outlook email client.The launch builds on Microsoft's ongoing push to capture the small business market. Earlier this year, the company launched Bookings, a service designed to help service-focused businesses manage customer appointments.It's a move by Microsoft to further compete with Salesforce and other players in the cloud CRM space. Companies that already have an Office 365 Business Premium subscription may not want to choose one of the competing CRM systems, if they can get OCM for free.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Premature publication of news is a common mistake on both our end and that of vendors. Today was Microsoft's turn to suffer an oops with the premature announcement that it is bringing its flagship development tool to the Mac. Microsoft will be hosting its Connect(); 2016 developer conference in New York City later this week, which will be the launch grounds for Visual Studio for Mac, but for whatever reason, the news was published early to an MSDN blog. Several sites, including TechCrunch and Neowin, got the news before the blog post was taken down, although a cached version is available from Google.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Since Alan Masarek joined Vonage as its CEO, the company has been on a mission to redefine how businesses communicate with workers and customers. The term unified communications has been somewhat of a fallacy, as collaboration tools are disjointed and require a high amount of manual integration. Sure, there has been some advancements with respect to bringing voice, video and content sharing together, but the tools are primarily limited to users communicating with other workers with basic collaboration tools. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If your IT department isn’t already worried about staff retention, some new stats might change that. A new poll finds 37% of IT pros plan to begin searching for a new employer in 2017, and 26% plan to accept a new job.Many factors are driving people’s desire for a job change, according to Spiceworks’ 2017 Tech Career Outlook. The most frequently cited reasons are: to advance my IT skills (cited by 69%); to get a more competitive salary (64%); to work at a company that makes IT more of a priority (40%); I’m burnt out at my current job (40%); to find a better work-life balance (38%); to get better benefits (401k, healthcare) (33%); to work with a more talented IT team (26%); to get better work-from-home options (24%); to get a better job title (22%).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There’s a rule of thumb in journalism that says three of anything is a trend. If that’s true, then the world’s largest social network is in the middle of one very tough trend. In the last week or so, the company has been absorbing criticism on three separate fronts, from embarrassing gaffes to potentially helping sway the results of that election—in multiple ways. Facebook = election influencer?
Let’s start at the top: with the election. Donald Trump’s victory surprised a lot of people, and one reason—say the Monday morning quarterbacks—is that Facebook and other social networks are how many people now get their news, which is creating bubbles where subscribers see primarily content that supports their own positions and politics. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Recent headlines suggest that blockchain technology is revolutionizing financial services. JP Morgan Chase, Barclays, Commonwealth Bank, Wells Fargo and several other leading banks are using the digital ledger technology to conduct equity swaps, cross-border trades, and other transactions.You might think that blockchain has gone mainstream. Not so fast, says former UBS CIO Oliver Bussmann, who claims it may take banks two years to run blockchain in production due to regulatory hurdles, a lack of standards and other stumbling blocks. “This is real, this will come but in a very regulated environment. We will go through a lot of validation,” says Bussmann, who jumpstarted blockchain efforts when he was leading IT at the Swiss bank last year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Software teams use test management tools to plan and track the quality assurance (QA) process — whether the tests are manual or automated — and then manage projects to eliminate the software defects uncovered by the tests.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Fast and powerfulThe twice-annual Top500 list of the most powerful supercomputers in the world (adjudged by their performance on the Linpack benchmark) is out this morning, and there are a pair of newcomers on the list. Check it out.TrinityImage by Los Alamos National LaboratoryTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
At a time when the size of distributed denial-of-service attacks has reached unprecedented levels, researchers have found a new attack technique in the wild that allows a single laptop to take down high-bandwidth enterprise firewalls.The attack, dubbed BlackNurse, involves sending Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) packets of a particular type and code. ICMP is commonly used for the ping network diagnostic utility, and attacks that try to overload a system with ping messages -- known as ping floods -- use ICMP Type 8 Code 0 packets.BlackNurse uses ICMP Type 3 (Destination Unreachable) Code 3 (Port Unreachable) packets instead and some firewalls consume a lot of CPU resources when processing them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Trends in enterprise IT are an interesting thing. Can you think of any other industry where hype has its own lifecycle?Whether it is because of the large budgets at stake or that enterprise IT professionals are uniquely susceptible to them, it seems the enterprise IT market is always awash in “hot new trends.” And as fast as they arise, most fizzle out.At least from that perspective, the IT service management (ITSM) space has had a pretty good run. It’s been over 20 years since the British government first introduced Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), creating the ITSM market.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As cybersecurity has become one of the most important strategic imperatives for the enterprise, concerns about how third-party IT services providers are protecting corporate data have grown. As a result, negotiation of cybersecurity and data privacy issues has become one of the most challenging areas in IT outsourcing contract negotiations, says Rebecca Eisner, partner in the Chicago office of law firm Mayer Brown.“Suppliers are understandably concerned about not paying damages that are disproportionate to the revenue received, and therefore seek to limit or disclaim their liability,” says Eisner. “Customers are equally concerned, particularly where suppliers do not have the same incentives to protect customer data as the customer, and because the negative impacts of a security incident are generally far more significant to the customer than to the supplier.” What’s more, the cybersecurity regulatory environment is rapidly evolving, making it difficult for both sides to access the risks. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Machine learning couldn’t be hotter, with several heavy hitters offering platforms aimed at seasoned data scientists and newcomers interested in working with neural networks. Among the more popular options is TensorFlow, a machine learning library that Google open-sourced a year ago.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
President-elect Donald Trump gave laid-off IT workers something his rival, Hillary Clinton, did not during the campaign: Attention and a promise to reform the H-1B visa program.The IT workers that Trump wanted to appeal to don't work for startups, Google, Facebook or Microsoft. They run IT systems at insurance firms, banks, utilities and retailers. They live in Rust Belt cities and in New York City, but are too spread out for pollsters to measure.Trump recognized that IT workers are aggrieved and so did Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), who worked with the president-elect on this issue. Sessions, after being appointed in early 2015 as the chairman of the Senate immigration subcommittee, set out to become "the voice of the American IT workers who are being replaced with guest workers."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Eren says that businesses typically approach BYOD from the perspective of hardware security. But instead of worrying about security on devices and peripherals, Eren says businesses should focus on securing the corporate data that resides on the devices and creating policies around what can and cannot live on a personal device.Eren says it's not hardware and devices that are the security threat, it's the apps that host corporate data, which is what hackers are after. Your BYOD strategy doesn't need to be overly complex, he says, but it does need to work within the parameters of your business and be something that can grow and adapt as technology evolves.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.NetCrunch 9.3Key features: Version 9.3 of the NetCrunch network monitoring system introduces an overhauled GUI, live up/down traffic on physical segments, new views for smaller networks, and integration with JIRA, ConnectWise and more. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Samsung Electronics wants to buy its way into the connected car market, with a plan to acquire Harman for US$8 billion.It's the latest in a line of acquisitions by Samsung, as it seeks to diversify its business beyond the slowing smartphone market. Other recently announced deals include last month's buy of artificial intelligence startup Viv Labs, which has developed a virtual personal assistant Samsung hopes to put in its consumer electronics products, and the June purchase of Joyent, a supplier of cloud services for the internet of things.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Having worked on Wall Street for many years, I’m a big believer in extracting the biggest return on technology investments. After all, anything that impacts the bottom line should be thoroughly analyzed from all sides of the value equation.
Now more than ever, CIOs are being scrutinized for their ability to increase ROI while driving innovation and digital transformations. According to more than 3,000 CIOs and technology leaders gathered for the 2016 Harvey Nash/KPMG CIO Survey, the role of today’s CIO is being stretched in many directions amid shifting priorities and pressures. + Also on Network World: Network World annual State of the Network survey results +
More CIOs report directly to CEOs than at any time in the past decade, rising 10 percent in the past year to 34 percent of the survey respondents. And, while 37 percent of the CIOs surveyed are still focused on saving money, almost two-thirds are helping CEOs identify IT projects that generate revenue. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Recently, while going through my bookmarks in Chrome to determine which ones I wanted to keep, I accidentally deleted all of them. Rather than panic, I felt an odd sense of…relief. I realized that I had collected several hundred bookmarks over the years, and that managing them was difficult.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)